Ready, set, dough: Pie-makers bracing for their piece of the action on Super Bowl Sunday

Rob Hodges cuts a pie at the Garibaldi's Pizza near the UofM as the store gears up for Super Bowl Sunday, one of its busiest days of the year.

Super Bowl Sunday is coming and pie-makers in Memphis and across the country are bracing for a pizza reaction.

Turns out this is one of the five big pizza days of the year. The other four? Halloween, the day before Thanksgiving, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, says Jeremy White, editor-in-chief of the trade magazine Pizza Today.

All of which require some serious flour power. At Papa John's, officials expect to sell a million pizzas when the Steelers meet the Packers on Sunday, making it the chain's biggest day of the year.

In preparation, the 3,200-restaurant chain will be shipping more than 2 million pounds of cheese through its 10 distribution centers, plus 350,000 pounds of pepperoni.

Adding a logistical assist is Manhattan Associates, which makes the software Papa John's uses to coordinate shipping. The deliveries will involve 300,000 miles of travel, or 1.3 round trips to the moon, says Tony Thompson, president of Papa John's Food Service.

Perhaps that's why the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.

Why does pizza get such a big slice of the Super Bowl snack-verse?

"Pizza is a party food. It's a communal food. It's meant to be shared. It's inexpensive and everyone likes it," says White.

On average, pizzerias will see a boost of about 35 percent when the NFC and AFC battle it out, says White. Although recent years have seen a shift toward trendier toppings like sun-dried tomatoes and avocados, on Super Bowl Sunday old-school favorites like pepperoni and sausage tend to rule.

At the Domino's Pizza chain, officials expect to deliver more than 9 million slices of pizza on Super Bowl Sunday.

Mike Garibaldi, owner of Memphis-based Garibaldi's Pizza, said while Super Bowl Sunday is dominated by the big chains, his stores gear up for the event with special employee shifts scheduled around kick-off and halftime.

"Planning and preparation make the game performance, so it's a lot like a football game," Garibaldi said.

"You know it's coming and you get your plan down and get ready and then you execute it. It's all part of it."

Super Bowl Sunday is one of the top 10 busiest days of the year, Garibaldi said. Unexpected snow days remain the busiest days of the year, he said.

For many sit-down pizza restaurants, Super Bowl isn't so super, as diners are likely to be glued to their seats for three hours or more.

On the other hand, to-go and delivery pizza orders are much higher than normal.

Usually, the Super Bowl rush begins in the mid-afternoon and lasts through halftime.

At Papa John's, preparations for Super Bowl Sunday sales began in December, with contingency supply plans in place and hourly plans laid out.

"That afternoon, they've really got to make sure that the normal execution is taken up three levels," says Thompson.

That includes bringing on more drivers to make sure the last link in the chain, delivery, runs smoothly.